Clean Break by Jacqueline Wilson

you?’
    â€˜Look where it got me,’ Gran snorted. ‘He pushed off and left me stranded with your mum. Still, at least I learned from my mistakes.’ She shook her head at Mum.
    â€˜You don’t always have to be right, Gran,’ I said. ‘Dad
will
come back, you’ll see. It will all come right and we’ll be happy again.’
    â€˜What’s that pink animal flapping past your nose? Whoops, it’s a flying pig,’ said Gran. ‘If you ask me, I doubt you’ll ever see him again.’
    â€˜We’re not asking you. Of course we’ll see him. I’ll see him every day at the Palace,’ said Mum.
    The Pink Palace really looks like a palace. It’sa huge Victorian building with little towers and turrets. It used to be owned by a big insurance company but they sold it off in the 1960s and someone painted it bright pink all over and turned it into a gift emporium. The pink is faded and peeling now and the towers and turrets are crumbling, but the gift emporium is still there, though half the stalls have closed down.
    There are still T-shirt stalls and silver jewellery stalls and second-hand CD stalls and weird stalls that sell all sorts of junk and rubbish. The best stall of all was my dad’s Fairyland. It was very tiny, in its own dark little grotto, with luminous silver stars twinkling on the ceiling and a big glitter ball making sparkles all over the floor. There were fairy frocks and fairy wings and magical fairy jewellery, fairy wands and fairy figurines and entire sets of Casper Dream fairy books.
    I
was the one who gave Dad the idea for Fairyland! When I was much younger I had this embarrassing obsession with fairies. I was desperate to have a proper fairy dress. I can’t help squirming now, because I’ve always been a great fat lump even when I was little, but I still fancied myself in a pink gauze sticking-out skirt with matching wings.
    Dad searched everywhere to buy one that would fit me for my birthday. He tried to find a specialist fairy shop. Then he had this brilliantidea. He decided to open his own fairy stall and call it Fairyland.
    It was a success at first, because his prices were very low and if kids came along and looked wistful he’d often bung them free fairy bubbles or pixie toffees. He even hired himself out to do themed fairy parties on Saturdays. All the little girls loved him. The mums loved him too. But whenever Dad had an acting job he shut the stall up, and even when he wasn’t working he couldn’t always be bothered to trail down to the Palace and sit inside his Fairyland. He started to lose customers, so Mum would attach a little card to his white security railings: IF YOU FANCY ANY OF THE FAIRIES , PLEASE APPLY TO JULIE AT THE RAINBOW HAIRDRESSING SALON ON THE THIRD FLOOR .
    Mum went into work five days a week, sometimes six when they were short-staffed, and she worked right through till ten on Thursdays, when it was late-night shopping. She really did dye people’s hair all colours of the rainbow. Vita and I begged her to dye
our
hair shocking pink or deep purple or bright blue but she just laughed at us.
    She went back to work on 2 nd January. I stayed at home with Vita and Maxie and Gran. I got out my brand-new journal and sat staring at the first blank page. After ten minutes I wrote:
Saw Dad
. I waited, sucking the end of my pen. Then I closedthe journal with a snap. I didn’t feel like writing any more.
    It was a long long long day. I couldn’t wait for Mum to come home. She was later than usual. I started to get excited. Maybe that meant Mum and Dad were having a drink together, talking things over. Maybe right this minute Dad was telling Mum he had made a terrible mistake. Then he’d kiss her the way he’d kissed Sarah. They’d come home together, arms wrapped round each other, our mum and dad.
    I went running to the front door as soon as I heard the key in the lock. Mum was